And flowers rained on him. Nothing could assuage
The tumult of the welcome save the song
That for the beggars he had sung that day
While standing in the city’s busy way.”
So when in his old age the great tenor, Duprez, reappeared to sing some stanzas he had composed in behalf of the sufferers by an inundation, as he said he could no longer utter the sensational cry of Arnold in William Tell, Suivez-moi, but that he still had strength to sing Secourons le malheur, the house rang with plaudits.
The flexibility of the actor, his sympathetic art, the affecting poetic situations in which he is seen set off by aggrandizing and romantic adjuncts, clothe him with fascinating associations, make him gazed after and courted. This is one secret of the keen interest felt in him. He who gives the most powerful signs of soul is naturally thought to have the greatest soul. The great have always been drawn to make favorites of actors. Demosthenes was the friend of Satyrus; Cicero, of Roscius; Louis the Fourteenth, of Molière; Bolingbroke, of Barton Booth; Napoleon, of Talma; Byron, of Kean. The Duke of Northumberland gave Kemble ten thousand pounds sterling. Lord Loughborough settled a handsome annuity on Macklin in his destitute age; and when the old actor in his one hundred and eighth year was about to die he besought the friend who had agreed to write his life to make grateful mention of this.
Players have given kings and nobles greater benefits than they have received from them, often teaching them character as well as manners. When the Earl of Essex told Edmund Kean that by continuing to associate with Incledon, the decayed singer, he would endanger his own further welcome in the upper class, the actor replied, “My lord, Incledon was my friend, in the strictest sense of the word, when I had scarcely another friend in the world; and if I should now desert him in the decline of his popularity and the fall of his fortunes I should little deserve the friendship of any man, and be quite unworthy of the favorable opinion your lordship has done me the honor to entertain for me.” Thus speaking, he rose, and, with a profound bow to the earl, left the room.
The greatest social characters have not only always affected the society of gifted players, but have themselves had a profound passion for the personal practice of the art. This is because the art deals with all the most subtile secrets of human nature and experience, out of which grow those arts of power which they feel to be their peculiar province. It is also because in this practice they escape from the empty round of the merely conventional and titular which soon becomes so wearying to the soul and so nauseous to the heart, and come into the realm of reality. The effect produced by the king, the deference paid to him, may be hollow. The power of the actor depends on genuine gifts, on his own real being and skill and charm. And he sees through all cold forms and shallow pretences. His very art, in its bedizenments and factitious accessories, sickens him of all shams in private life. There he wants sincerity and the unaffected substantial goods of nature, a friendly fellowship springing straight from the heart. When the wife of Kean asked him what Lord Essex had said of his Shylock, the actor replied, “Damn Lord Essex. The pit rose at me!” A common soldier with whom Cooke had quarrelled refused to fight him because he was rich and the persons present would favor him. Cooke said, “Look here, sir. This is all I possess in the world,” showing three hundred and fifty pounds in bank-notes, which he immediately thrust into the fire, holding the poker on them till they were consumed. Then he added, “Now I am a beggar, sir. Will you fight me now?”
This democratic spirit which spurns social affectations and tramples unreal claims, keenly recognizing distinctions but insisting that they shall be genuine and not merely supposititious, is the very genius of the drama as felt in its inmost essence. Rulers have ever delighted to evade their imprisonment in etiquette, put on an incognito, and disport themselves in the original relishes of human intercourse on the basis of facts. Nothing in literature is more charming than the adventures in this kind of Haroun-al-Raschid and his Vizier in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Nero and Commodus were proudest of all to strip off their imperial insignia and win plaudits by their performances in the amphitheatre. Julius Cæsar acted in his own theatre the part of Hercules Furens. He was so carried away by the spirit of the rôle that he actually killed the youth who played Lycus and swung the body two or three times round his head. Louis the Fourteenth appeared in the Magnificent Lovers, by Molière, and pantomimed, danced, sang, and played on the flute and the guitar. He especially loved in gorgeous ballets to perform the rôle of the Sun; and in the ballet of the Seasons he repeatedly filled the rôle of the blonde Ceres surrounded by harvesters. Even Oliver Cromwell once acted the part of Tactus in the play of “Lingua, or the Combat of the Five Senses for Superiority.”
But the life of the dramatic profession is not all a brilliant round of power, gayety, and indulgence. It too has sacrifices, toils, tears, strenuous duty and virtue, tragedy, mystery, and triumph. The strange picture of human life and death is nowhere more vividly reflected than in the theatrical career. The little prodigy James Speaight, whose performances on the violin had for three years been applauded by crowds, when he was not yet seven years old, was one evening slightly ill as he left the stage. About midnight his father heard him say, “Gracious God, make room for another little child in heaven.” The father spoke, received no answer, and on going to him found him dead. In 1819, a Mlle. Charton made her débût at the Odéon. Her enchanting loveliness and talent captivated all. Intoxicated Paris rang with her praises. Suddenly she ceased to act. A jealous lover had flung into that beautiful and happy face a cup of vitriol, destroying beauty, happiness, and eyesight forever. She refused to prosecute the ruffian, but sat at home, suffering and helpless, and was soon absorbed in the population and forgotten. What could be more dreadful than such a doom, or more pathetic than such submission! In fact, many of those who lived by acting on the stage have given as noble specimens of acting off of it as are to be found in history. Mrs. Porter, a famous actress of the generation preceding Garrick, riding home after the play, in a one-horse chaise, was accosted by a highwayman with a demand for her money. “She levelled a pistol at him, when he changed his tone to supplication, told her his name and the abode of his starving family, and appealed to her compassion so strongly that she gave him ten guineas. He left her, and, as she lashed her horse, the animal started aside, upset the chaise, and in the fall her hip-joint was dislocated. Notwithstanding all the pain and loss the man had thus occasioned her, she inquired into his circumstances, and, finding that he had told her the truth, raised sixty pounds among her acquaintances and sent it to his family.” Her lameness forced her to leave the stage, and she had herself to subsist upon charity.